Sabbatical

As of Friday night, I am now on a two month unpaid leave. There are a few reasons I want to do this. It’s getting towards the 3-year point at Mozilla, and that’s usually the sort of time I get itchy feet to try something new. I also think I may have been getting a bit close to burn-out, which is obviously no good. I love my job at Mozilla and I think they’ve spoiled me too much for me to easily work elsewhere even if that wasn’t the case, so that’s one reason to take an extended break.

I still think Mozilla is a great place to work, where there are always opportunities to learn, to expand your horizons and to meet new people. An unfortunate consequence of that, though, is that I think it’s also quite high-stress. Not the kind of obvious stress you get from tight deadlines and other external pressures, but a more subtle, internal stress that you get from constantly striving to keep up and be the best you can be. Mozilla’s big enough now that it’s not uncommon to see people leave, but it does seem that a disproportionate amount of them cite stress or needing time to deal with life issues as part of the reason for moving on. Maybe we need to get better at recognising that, or at encouraging people to take more personal time?

Another reason though, and the primary reason, is that I want to spend some serious time working on creating a game. Those who know me know that I’m quite an avid gamer, and I’ve always had an interest in games development (I even spoke about it at Guadec some years back). Pre-employment, a lot of my spare time was spent developing games. Mostly embarrassingly poor efforts when I view them now, but it’s something I used to be quite passionate about. At some point, I think I decided that I preferred app development to games development, and went down that route. Given that I haven’t really been doing app development since joining Mozilla, it feels like a good time to revisit games development. If you’re interested in hearing about that, you may want to follow this Twitter account. We’ve started already, and I like to think that what we have planned, though very highly influenced by existing games, provides some fun, original twists. Let’s see how this goes 🙂